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"From Light to Ink" featured the work of Canon Inspirers and contest winners, all printed using Canon's imagePROGRAF printers. The gallery show revolved around the discussion of printing photographs...

DPP 3.9.2 new Unsharp Mask

I was already a happy user of Canon's Digital Photo Professional for my RAW images, but I have to say the new Unsharp Mask function is really useful and can reveal details left invisible by the original sharpening method. I just played with a number of images and my findings are:

"Sharpen" (the original) enhances shadow details better, has less tendency for halos, which retains colors better, but does not sharpen fine details and textures in mid and high tones, such as skin, flower petals or light rock formations. These will have a smooth baby-skin or plastic appearance which is not always desirable.

"Unsharp mask" defaults to a "Fineness" of 7, which is pretty rough, but when set to a value around 2 it renders quite pleasantly, when "Strength" is 1-3. The "Threshold" can be set low, which enhances fine details a lot, except in the shadows (and also in dark hairs). One has to be much more careful with halos and noise here, obviously. For dark images and shadows the original "Sharpen" method seems more effective.

USM is best used as the final step before printing because the image looks best when the amount is optimized for print size. Also, it works best if applied selectively and not globally to the entire image (e.g., skip dark shadows and skies) or it will bring out noise. For these reasons I use little sharpening during RAW conversion but wait until after I resize for print or web galleries.